I attended a 3-hour virtual meetup tonight and really enjoyed it. I could put "Not getting to socialize in person" into the not happy thread, but I'd rather post here and celebrate the fact that technology let me meet a few interesting new people safely. Yay!
I've made significant progress on my fitness goal the last few weeks with the biggest goal of running a 5k next year. I'm using the Couch to 5k program and I like it for the most part. I also had peanut butter toast for part of my dinner. Which seems really small to be happy about, but it was exactly what I wanted.
Marching band is going good so far! I'm finally in the show rather than just watching from the side-lines. Color-guard is soooooo awesome. My school is in the top four of Tournament of Bands and this coming competition, if we get a good placement, that means we have a shot at Semi-finals! I'm attaching a picture of our colorguard uniform. Every band has a theme and my school's is Leonardo Da Vinci for this season. (I scratched out my friends' faces for privacy obviously, me i don't care too much about)
I've lost 22 pounds since the end of May. I don't yet look the way I wish I did, but I can get into my (skinny) clothes again. So I will be happy about it. I will!
Finally got it done, though I'm not the best at wood working, I did my best. Plays really good on clean.
Lol somehow I thought you had said Leonardo Di Caprio. I looked at the picture and was all like "What does this have to do with... ohhh, OK!"
My daughter got married in our backyard this past weekend. We had about 65 friends and family show up. It was a lot of work to pull off, just as much to clean up. When my daughter was a little girl I offered help with a house or a wedding, she chose the house, so we did a small wedding in the backyard. She was nine when I asked which she wanted.
My daughter wanted both, and she got both by paying for them herself. I cooked the wedding dinner for 35 as my contribution. Their daughter was born last month, which is my latest happy news.
When Cathy was a little girl I had no idea that she would grow up and work with me. She has helped me in my construction business, logging business and motorcycle business. She is a surgical nurse and while she was in school, and while working all it took was a phone call for her to show up at 4 am to go to work. She has been my workout partner and we have done obstacle racing and road biking together for years. Even as adults my kids and I have shared vacations. She has put in long hours to help in the many businesses we have been involved in over the years. A dad could not ask for a more loyal daughter and being able to help out with her marriage was a small way to pay her back.
A writer whose work I really enjoy just left a comment on one of my Medium stories: "Congratulations! You've written my favorite sentence on Medium today." Hooray for being appreciated! That's way more exciting than the buck and change that I've earned from the story so far.
First story that I ever wrote (in 2018) just published in current Black Petals. The story has its limitations, obviously, though I still have affection for it. No payment but it has an illustration attached that I think looks really cool and improves my attachment to it. Happiness indeed!
That's fantastic! I'd love to see one of my stories illustrated, and I'm glad you liked what the artist did with yours. Congratulations!
Broke some non-holiday sales records at work tonight. A perfect confluence of shows, waterfires, and parents' weekends at various colleges. Sold all my A5, sold all my Dom Perignon, and half the food in my walkin. Don't think I'll be getting out of bed tomorrow.
Congratulations on a good day. I have yet to figure out the trends. One business makes things for when the economy booming and people have disposable income, the other thrives on high energy prices and people saving money. In both businesses I am months behind, it makes no sense to me. Is the economy good or bad?
Excellent but volatile? From where I'm sitting, disposable income seems to be limitless, but people haven't been buying cars, houses, traveling, or undertaking large renovation projects due to the lack of building material, contractors, and the general decimation of the supply chain. And while I've been able to add roughly a million dollar in sales, my food and labor margins haven't scaled proportionally. They've gotten better, but not a rate that suggests my sales gains are doing as much work for me as they should be, meaning that my revenue gain isn't keeping up with my expense gain. In a stable market, revenue and profit work at a relative 1:1 ratio. Sales go up 20%? Your profit should go up about 20%, too. Now, I would say that my 20% gain is translating to more of a 10% profit gain, which is great--a gain is a gain is a gain--however, my sales don't need to fall as far as you'd think to slide back into the red. I'm staying ahead of general inflation and the rising cost of labor, which tells me the business model is solid, but not at a rate of gain that convinces me it's rock solid. A great point, and one I would stay away from today. When consumers are paying record prices for everything, there isn't much utility in selling below market, unless you have an abundant product in a short supply market. Like cars, which nobody can find parts for or produce inventory fast enough to keep up with demand. In theory, if a new car company emerged tomorrow with all makes and models filling every lot in America, they could afford to undercut everybody else and dominate the market.
I make fence, which nobody needs and is one of the things that you spend money on when you ran out of other things to spend it on. I have a good corner on the market, there are no other custom fence makers within a couple hundred miles of me. Half of my stuff goes out of state. The fire wood I sell by the truckload, and I am today 31 loads behind. I own enough standing timber to keep me going for the next 4 years. While others invested in stocks, I bought land and timber, the value of the standing timber has more than doubled in value with rise in construction materials, so I made out really well with that, but I suffer the same problems you do with labor. The price of fuel going up lets me charge more than the actual cost of delivering the final product. I have always tried to have different businesses that peak at different times of the year, and tend to thrive on either a bad or a good economy. This is the first time in 40 plus years that both business models thrived at the same time. I have everything but a stable supply of labor.
